At the End of All Things
by Acharion
Summary: Maglor and Maedhros at the very end.


Moments before they had been happy, elated, laughing and screaming to the very stars above that something, much greater than they, had been achieved. The final completion of an Oath sworn long ago under very different skies. Running madly, breath catching, not from fear this time, but for sheer joy. The blood seemed to run off of their swords in eager rivulets, cleaning themselves. It mattered little, they had no need of them anymore. The camp of the Valar was far away by now. A painful ache of eons was lifted from them as suddenly as a fog dissolves in the light of a new sun.

Survivors! Victors! Finally!

Maglor had not seen Maedhros giddy and gleeful like this for so many years. He had laughed, a real bubbling burst of happiness from his core, and looked young again as he lifted the wooden lid on the box that held the gems, red hair washed black with soot in a terrible disguise, smearing down onto his face with sweat. Maglor had laughed too, so many unspeakable things fading away in the light of accomplishment, so many horrors forgotten. "Less evil we shall do in the breaking", he had said once. Those words seemed to be suddenly meaningless.

He held out his hands, smiling and eager. The purest light drifting down slowly to his outstretched and waiting palms, glowing with its hallowedness. A pure and sacred thing. Just a hair's breath away from his fingertips the gem screamed of heat and yet it was not enough to stop him from desperate grasping. Hands greedily wrapped around its bright white immaculate edges. For a peaceful moment he bathed in it, exhaled a long breath he had not known he had been holding. But even in that blissful moment, it was not long before everything around him turned to pain and ash and chaos.

There were screams, before he heard his own. An echoing tumble of torment down into the crevice near him.

When the seething clouds of smoke and tendrils of fire had cleared, he gazed around. Meadhros had not fled he knew, but neither was he present. A wide gap in the earth emitted smoke and fire right before him. Maglor creepex over to the edge and could see nothing below. No hint of a body, no shine of a Silmaril. Between the gaps of belching steam, he stared down into the writhing rivers of tortuous lava and saw nothing but fire.

He stumbled away from the brink where he now remembered he had desperately grasped at Maedhros' cloak as it fluttered away from his burned fingers. Stunned, frightful, and yet not a bit surprised.

A cold calm embraced him for just a moment. His own stone was held fast in his burned hands, protected from him, or he protected from it, by a torn piece of his own cloak he didn't remember making, and with this least bit of armor it burned him naught. It felt warm and heavy and maybe even alive and breathing between his fingers. A few moments ago, he had thought himself the rightful owner, suddenly possessing a well-earned piece of his father's legacy. The conqueror of the Oath that had hammered out the shape of his life. Claiming the inheritance of his House, the grand achievement after an age of battle and death, a lifetime of sacrifice.

The gem itself had spoken otherwise while it burned and marred his flesh.

Around him, the world burned. Fire pits, and stinking bellows and treacherous crevasses. Beleriand was falling.

Confused and unsure of what to do, Maglor ran. Away from the burning chasm, an instinct to put as much distance between himself and its horrible heat as possible, the stinking burning of flesh that wallowed out of that horrible grave. A dull fear of his own death drove him onward. No destination in mind, just a dreadful aching and far away voice that screamed well below hearing. A searing pain running though his hands, a cold horror running through his chest. The very ground around him was smoking, beckoning him also with broken fingers of stone. And yet, without guidance, Maglor was able to find his way around them, thoughtlessly and without looking.

He ran, breath quickening, chest heaving, tears running down his face unnoticed. He ran for what he would have accounted many long hours but was only a handful of minutes before he stopped.

The shore should have been farther away. Yet all around he could hear the breaking of stone and cliffs crashing down into the waves. He halted suddenly, without conscious reason, just as the grit beneath his boots came to an abrupt end. The world was failing, falling, with Maglor upon the precipice. He had heard no noise of the sea until he came just upon it. It's scathing, raging, roaring waves breaking upon the shore flanked by a terrible blood red sky broken only by churning black clouds. An angry surge of water far below burst upon the shore and still dusted his hair and his eyelashes with salt-mist.

Though he had not known he was searching for it in his mindless fleeing, the Great Sea came rising up towards him eager, grasping, and cold. Whispering water luring him forward and downward. A beckoning voice softly screaming to him. The earth fell away at his feet, tumbling stones slipping beneath his boots. Despite the warmth of the smoldering earth that had claimed his brother (could he be gone? He couldn't really be gone), wind whipped his cloak about him and tangled icy fingers into his hair. The world he had known was dying, screaming in torment, wrenching itself apart into crumbling pieces. Beleriand fallen. He so believed that he was utterly alone upon that cliff face that when gulls cried overhead, stirring him from somnolence, he looked at them bewildered.

The stone began to ache again in his hands, they were beginning to bleed again, and he wished more than anything to let it go and yet hold it close to his breast and become what had been dreamed of in wanton years. A salvation to his people, a symbol of the defeat of the Tyrant, a memory of his father. The completion of a promise. The fulfillment of and Oath. The burning sensation came through even several levels of cloth and it slowly changed from an ache into a real pain. It should not be so, it should not be so, it should not...He hurled the beloved and accursed thing into the sea, letting out a horrible, wretched, and defeated cry. Like a shooting star, but duller and less radiant than he remembered, the gem flew from his hand and soared towards the ocean in a crystalline arc. It's light had stirred his heart to devotion in Aman and drawn him to murder in Eönwë's camp. Why did it look so blurred now?)

It landed with an anti-climactic and unsatisfying plop into the cold waters, it's inner light slowly slinking down. With that action, he thought, there should have been, at the very least, a lightness. A fulfillment, a release. But when he was finally able to look at the grey waves below, there was no hint of the treasure buried beneath. No glint of Treelight, no light at all.

Let Ulmo find it and do what he will, then. Let it sink to the bottom of the ocean and be hidden among the coral and the sand. Let others find it and find their own doom, Maglor didn't care. He knelt on the pinnacle over the Sea for many hours. Let it be lost, he prayed, let this be the very end of it all. All was lost for him, let it be the same for others.

Now slow erosion and decay, the things that Morgoth had introduced to the world were working under him once again. In minuscule crumbling, the earth had begun to fall away while he had mourned until a sudden rumbling and a tremor made him truly realize that another world he had known and once loved was being lost.

The sea cliffs suddenly broke beneath his knees as they had under his boots earlier. And while watching their dismantlement, the cold and far away voice he had heard earlier but not understood seemed to scream above the waves, clear as a cleanly struck bell, "stay alive".

A singular drive startled him, shook him, to flee. And though the voice quieted as soon as it spoke, the echo of its plea rang in his ears, moved him from inaction, and he frantically scuffled back against the dried and dying grass just as the precipice of the cliff gave way and fell into the frothing waters with a crashing heave. For a brief moment, open air was beneath his feet.

When solid ground was under all his limbs again, a second voice, one he recognized more, one more tantalizing than the other was in his ears, "Maedhros wouldn't have feared this". No. That was true, but Maedhros hadn't seemed to have feared the fires either. Once again Maglor hurtled backwards, feet kicking now at the dirt and mud that surrounded him. "Stay alive." the other voice whispered at him again, and this time he listened. Taking to his feet, he took one last long look at the edge of Beleriand, the raging clouds, the decimated ruin, the foaming waters hiding the fulfilment of an unspeakable Oath, and ran from its destruction.


End file.
